LAST DAYS ON THE HOMESTEAD
"Oh, boy, we'll never get this done!" I muttered to myself as I stopped for a moment to wipe the sweat off my face. Try as hard as I could, I just couldn't keep up with Robert. He was 'way off down the row, far ahead of me, his machete swinging like a machine as he hand cut the corn we were harvesting. My job was to follow him, gather the corn stalks into bundles of ten or twelve stalks, and tie the bundles with a corn stalk. Then when we had enough bundles, we worked together to make shocks, using about a dozen bundles to make one shock. It seemed like an endless job, cutting and shocking that ten-acre field!
What worried us most, though, was that high school had already started in Hinsdale, and we were missing school! How could we ever catch up--especially, I wondered how I could catch up if I got started late in a strange school, my first year of high school? It bothered Robert, too, as he was a senior, and hated the thought of being behind in his studies. He was in a neck-and-neck race with one of his classmates to be valedictorian--the head of the class. Our sister Jean had already started on her second year, staying in Hinsdale with friends.
You see, this was the fall of 1932, and a momentous year for all of us. Dad and Mom had finally decided that it would be necessary to leave the homestead! When they first started out, in 1913, they had borrowed $1000 to buy horses, equipment, and building materials. Over the years, despite all their hard work, they simply had not been able to do more than pay the interest on the mortgage each year; the principal was unpaid. Those were terribly hard times. Part of that summer of 1932 Dad had been forced to work on the county roads, to pay the property taxes with labor, as many other men were doing. Now he was away teaching school on the South Bench, out south and across the Milk River. It was thirty or more miles in a straight line to the school where he batched during the week, and he could only come home on weekends.
Dad had located a farm two and a half miles out of Hinsdale that we could rent. But before we could move, we must cut the big field of corn! It represented the feed for our cows for the coming winter, and must be cut and hauled before snow fell. Thus we boys had the job of getting that corn cut and shocked, before we could hope to begin school. We had been promised that when we had the job done, we could start school.
You can imagine how I felt those days! Here I was ready to start in high school, in a strange town, a school with hundreds of kids, which seemed scary to me. The most students we had ever had at Richter school was seventeen! How would I get along with so many strangers?
Finally, almost six weeks into the school term, we finished the corn! The folks still weren't ready to move down to the new place. Accordingly, they arranged for the three of us Cumming kids to batch in a tiny apartment located upstairs in a remote corner of the school dormitory, in Hinsdale. The apartment had only a little gas plate, not a proper cooking stove, and there was room for our beds and almost nothing else. But it was a place to stay, and we got settled in quickly. Both Jean and Robert could do simple cooking, as they had batched the previous year, so we wouldn't starve.
In the meantime, the folks were very busy getting ready for the move to the rented farm, which we called the Burke Place. It had once been the homestead of a man named Billy Burke. He had been the husband of my third grade teacher, Mrs. Rose Burke. Billy had a bad problem with drinking, and had died young, I believe. Mrs. Burke made her living teaching school, and rented the farm out to various people. We were to live there three years.
Finally, about the middle of November, we were ready to move. I can still remember that last trip out to the old homestead. The job of loading the sad little load of furniture and other moveable things on the hayrack (because it held more than the wagon box), didn't take very long. We rounded up the cattle, put the chickens in coops, and were on our way. Dad had already hauled the corn and a lot of other stuff, on previous weekends. I drove the little bunch of cattle, walking most of the way to the new place--about twelve miles. It was very hard for Mom and all of us, going down that winding road to the "Point," turning for one last look at the old place, and then passing around the point and out of sight of our home for all those years. Although Dad went back once or twice later, doing the final clean-up of the move, I wasn't to see the old home again until 1946. By then all the buildings were gone, virtually without a trace.